91,250. Based on an average life span of 72 years, you will spend 91,250 hours working. That’s roughly 22.4% of our life, not including overtime.
228,000 hours will be spent sleeping, which means you only get an average of 394,000 hours of life, awake.
In comparison, we spend…
- 32,100 hours eating
- 4,320 hours exercising and taking care of ourselves
- 3,600 hours laughing
- And 42,300 hours of quality time with friends and loved ones.
- We will spend nearly twice as much time at work than with our spouse, our kids, our loved ones, or our friends.
Whatever you “clock-in” too, wherever you arrive for “Monday morning”, you are giving 1/4 of your life. The questions for us as Austin Business, Civic and Church leaders become – What will we do with our 91,250 hours? What will our attitude be? How will we leverage those hours? Will work be productive or generative? Will that 22.4% of our lives add value to our family, to the world around us?
Work is a part of God’s plan. It’s meant to be more than a paycheck.
On the birthday of humanity, God creates male and female, and then we read, “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
Essentially, God says, “Get to work. You’ve got people to create, things to manage, work to do.”
It isn’t until later we read, “with painful labor you will give birth to children,” “through painful toil you will eat food from it (the ground) all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”
What starts as a gift, a partnership with God in work and stewardship, becomes how most of us probably feel about work today, a painful toil. Maybe your “thistles and thorns” are spreadsheets, meetings, deadlines, or employee reviews; they have become obstacles and annoyances. But this wasn’t the original design for work. Work was meant to be a joyful life-giving process in partnership with God’s unique design of you, and His divine placement through each season. When we move through work as pain and toil we miss the opportunity to participate in a bigger picture designed for creation, we miss opportunity to make an impact.
Our career is a space to utilize our unique god given design. We get 91,250 hours to connect with purpose. How do you want your hours to look?
